Ryan Singel

Ryan Singel is a Media and Strategy Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Singel covered net neutrality, privacy, security, surveillance and tech policy for Wired from 2002 to 2012. He co-founded and later edited the award-winning Threat Level blog at Wired.

Singel founded Contextly, an engagement platform for publishers. Drawing on this experience as a startup founder and CEO, Singel wrote official comments on behalf of Contextly in the 2014 Open Internet proceedings, detailing how open internet rules were a pre-requisite for the founding and success of the company. After those comments were highlighted by media outlets, Singel was invited to represent small startups at a meeting with then-FCC chairman Tom Wheeler as he considered how best to institute formal neutrality rules.

Funding:

Ryan Singel’s salary, research support, and travel* are funded through the general budget of Stanford Law School. The Center for Internet and Society does not accept corporate funding for its network neutrality-related work.

In the lead-up to the FCC's historic vote in December 2017 to repeal all net neutrality protections, 22 million comments were filed to the agency.

But unfortunately, millions of those comments were fake. Some of the fake comment were part of sophisticated campaigns that filed fake comments using the names of real people - including journalists, Senators and dead people.

In the leadup to the FCC's historic vote in December 2017 to repeal all net neutrality protections, 22 million comments were filed to the agency.

But unfortunately, millions of those comments were fake. Some of the fake comment were part of sophisticated campaigns that filed fake comments using the names of real people - including journalists, Senators and dead people.

I’m passionate about how net neutrality enables startups to thrive without getting permission or paying taxes to the ISPs that people pay to get online.

Net neutrality is the simple principle that the marketplace, not ISPs, gets to decide what apps, websites, and services win and lose, and it’s enabled tens of thousand of entrepreneurs to build new things.

The FCC voted in December to repeal all meaningful net neutrality protections, undoing more than 15 years of FCC work and leaving startups vulnerable to the whims of ISPs like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

Those rules prohibited ISPs from blocking or slowing access to websites, apps and services, and prevented ISPs from charging access fees to sites to be in the fast lane or even simply to load for users.

Instead of listening to the thousand of startups and investors who argue that ending net neutrality would damage online innovation, FCC chair Ajit Pai is pushing a vote this Thursday to dismantle two decades of open internet protections in one of the biggest corporate giveaways in history.

FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal net neutrality provisions and reclassify broadband providers from “common carriers” to “information services” is an unprecedented giveaway to big broadband providers and a danger to the internet. The move would mean the FCC would have almost no oversight authority over broadband providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.

"Ryan Singel, Media and Strategy Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, explained that on a neutral net, service providers function as common carriers, meaning they can’t refuse or prioritize access to certain sites (so long as what’s on them is legal). ISPs have long sought to extract more money from highly trafficked sites.

"“The net neutrality repeal, at its heart, is really a way to allow the companies that we pay to get online, the Comcasts, the AT&Ts, the Verizons of the world, to make more money by figuring out how to get money out of the businesses that are online,” said Ryan Singel, the Media and Strategy Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society on a call with Jezebel."

"Ryan Singel, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, believes that legislation may survive judicial scrutiny, and the political prospects for defending the ruling are dim. “The sheer number of efforts across the states and across party lines goes to show how badly ISPs and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai misplayed their hands by ramming through a total repeal of net neutrality protections without regard to public or expert input,” he wrote by email. “It’s likely a preview of net neutrality being a prominent issue in the 2018 mid-terms and beyond.”"

"Oversight is a known issue in the ad industry, said Ryan Singel, co-founder of the publishing-tools firm Contextly: “If legitimate ad platforms actually did any due diligence, this scam would be far less profitable.”"

"With the Dec. 14 repeal, Comcast and others will be able to charge content companies exorbitant fees without, technically, blocking. This fundamentally changes how the internet works, argues Ryan Singel, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Any website or service may now have to pay ISPs to load, reducing the number and variety of free services. Expect telecoms to exploit this power extracting maximum fees and deterring new entrants."

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Since its start in 2001, the SF ISACA Fall Conference continues to be the premier education event for information technology audit, security, governance, risk and compliance professionals in Northern California. The SF ISACA Fall conference features five tracks packed with top flight speakers and cutting edge topics. CIS's Riana Pfefferkorn and Ryan Singel will be speaking at the event.

With recent news reports discussing changes with net neutrality, many are wondering, "What does it mean for my startup?!" It’s an important issue that affects anyone whose work and livelihood involves the web. For the sake of your business, you should be aware of the changes and how they affect your business.

The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) is a public interest technology law and policy program at Stanford Law School and a part of Law, Science and Technology Program at Stanford Law School. CIS brings together scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, innovation, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry.

The days are numbered for federal net neutrality regulations. In response, some states are working on their own versions to prevent internet service providers (ISP) from blocking, slowing or charging more for some web traffic. Oregon, Washington and several other states have made new rules, but a bill working its way through the California legislature would go the furthest. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke with Ryan Singel, a media and strategy fellow at Stanford Law School, about how a state can regulate a business that crosses state lines.